It’s been a hell of a week data breach wise….

The past 7 days have seen a raft of data breach stories, here’s the headlines:

Friday 1 June: The Information Commissioner’s Office hands out its largest ever to fine of £325,000 Brighton and Sussex University Hospital for a serious breach of the DPA.

Monday 4 June: The Daily Mail reports that a crime is committed every 40 minutes on Facebook

Tuesday 5 June: Hacktivist group Swaggsec claim to have hacked a sizeable amount of sensitive data from China Telecom and Warner Brothers

Wednesday 6 June: The ICO is at it again, this time with a £90,000 fine for Telford & Wrekcin Council for multiple breaches of the DPA.

LinkedIn is hacked and 6.5 million user’s passwords are stolen.

Thursday 7 June: Music website last.fm acknowledged a breach with an unknown amount of passwords stolen

Dating website eharmony confirms that 1.5million passwords have been compromised in a breach.

And these are just the ones we know about! One thing’s clear, no one is immune, whether you’re in the public or private sector, an online retailer or part of a state’s national infrastructure.

In regards to the breaches at Facebook, LinkedIn and eHarmony Graham Cluley, security expert at Sophos, told the BBC he worried the sites could have shared the same vulnerability.

“Can it be coincidence? It seems unlikely to me. There’s a mystery in the middle of the LinkedIn breach about how they got the data. You have to worry there’s a common vulnerability.”

The increase in cyber attacks continues unabated. Yet the education of individuals and the precautions organisations take still seem inadequate. Of course, hackers are becoming ever more sophisticated, and growing in numbers, but isn’t about time we all started taking this issue a little more seriously?